Reporter’s Diary

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33740, 13 January 1975, Page 2

Reporter’s Diary

Wounded

LEE Lan-ying, .wife of the old Japanese Army soldier who recently surfaced on the Indonesian island of Morotai to find the war over by three decades, has lost favour with her husband. She remarried eight years after he was listed as missing in World War 11, but when she learned that her first husband was still alive she persuaded her second husband to step aside. She promised to give him a small house and a buffalo. But when ’-ee Lanying explained the situation to her long-lost husband aboard a bus en route to their home village of Taitung in Taiwan, he replied curtly, tore his hand away from hers, and made the busdriver take him and his son t.o his sister’s house at another village instead.

Groundwork NEW ZEALAND’S first airport security chief has done some work which should prove of assistance to Detective SeniorSergeant T. J. C. Joy, who has just been seconded to the Civil Aviation Division of the Ministry of Transport to co-ordinate and strengthen security at the country’s airports. Mr R. J. Crooks, chief security officer at Christchurch Airport, recently sent the Civil Aviation Division a manual of duties for the guidance of airport security staff which he wrote on the basis of three years’ experience at Harewood. Mr Crooks is a former detective sergeant. Recycling

AT least one Christchurch shop is doing something to cope with the worldwide paper shortage. Instead of putting already pre-wrapped items into a paper bag, the Natural Foods health-food shop in Colombo Street near the Town Hall puts a customer’s purchases into neat little carrier bags which they make themselves out of old newspapers. They use a paper-folding tech* nique resurrected from childhood days. Heat control

THIS city’s preoccupation with fire-fighting may have stimulated one Merivale man’s subconscious to suggest that he reach for the fire extinguisher when he felt unbearably hot a few days ago. It was the carbonic variety that fires a jet of freezing CO2 gas, and a short burst lowered, in a matter of seconds, the room temperature from the high 100 s to what felt like zero.

Snails coming SNAILS may be slow, but they have enough sense to come in out of the cold, according to English folklore. In Britain, naturalists have been predicting a fierce winter partly on the evidence of the Cotswolds snails, which have been burrowing three times as deep as usual to escape the threatened chill. But “P.H.S.”, diarist for “The Times,” claims to have interviewed a spokesman for the snails ana learned that they were not trying to get away from the weather but from the prevailing gloom. One of the diarist’s annual predictions for 1975 is that the Cotswold snails will surface in New Zealand next December. Unseemly

WHEN Constable R. J. Caiman pulled his patrol car up at traffic lights in Newcastle. New South Wales, an unemployed youth rushed out from a milk bar and shouted “Oink! oink!” at aim. Constable Caiman subsequently told a Magistrate he believed the yell was “an act of bravado.” but the Magistrate fined Trevor Roy Hignell $45 for using “unseemly words.” Priorities “HOPE for the best, but prepare for the worst” could well be the philosophy of the organisers of the national Sea Cadet camp at Ripapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour. Their programme started with tramping, camping out overnight, sailing 17ft cutters round the harbour, and rifle shooting. Then come “search-and-rescue and first aid.”